The difference between the two is rather blurred now a days. People who purely work in the editor can get paid 50k as technical designers at Blizzard. And this is normal, many people do high level technical work, that simply uses other toolsets. And maybe this project will be a good experience on how difficult modern software projects are?

And yes, many in the modding community do it for free, for a few reasons usually

1) Passion. People do it because they like doing it.

2) Resume. People do it to gain experience for future career.

3) Education. People do it to better learn certain things, programming or other wise, sometime to simply better understand the subject matter, sometimes out of curiosity.

I don't doubt there are many talented people who contribute material and expect nothing from it. I would be one of them, I never expected anything directly monetary to ever arise from my modding work. I fall in #1 and #2.

I really would hope this game is not what a real production environment looks like. Though Blizzard always did complain their inhouse tools were atrocious, so maybe it is. 85k isn't enough for putting up with that, you're perfectly right. But that's a production environment selling at enormous profits and not a hobby.

Personally I've always refused to be monetarily involved in anything because it is a hobby and I never felt a hobby deserved to be paid. But now I do studio quality work at the minimum in most of my ventures and I plainly don't have the time to do requests anymore, so in that respect you are also correct, it has to be worth my while. Were things different, yeah, I'd do it all for free still. But I will never charge studio prices. 85k would get me a high quality, complete game in a real engine if properly managed and a bit of personal effort.

As for 85k being a lot of money... that's actually too little. For comparison, a full time game programmer expect usually to make in the 50-60k range, starting. So 85k over 2 people over 2 years... isn't enough.

Arguably, this is one component of why games tend to be rather buggy. They simply can't hire the best coders, who easily ask for 100k+ salaries, and have to compete with the likes of Wall St, Silicon Valley, and then all the midrange stuff (Oracle, Microsoft, many hardware companies, medical companies and so forth). Either game companies are going to have to start paying more or doing a better job of attracting people to them, and that will be hard given how little people are willing to pay for games (relative to other software, most other software costs 10x as much as games, either in direct sale price, or in service price).

The main thing with these kind of projects is not to get them done. It really isn't. It is to demonstrate you can organize such a thing to begin with, which surprisingly is hard, both in initial setup and sticking to it. My own project led to me getting my current job, because it demonstrated I had the persistence to see a project through, regardless of other circumstances (in case I have not stated this before, I work on Night of the Dead and currently we are doing its sequel NOTD 2).

I hardly even know where to begin. It doesn't really matter how much or how little it is. It's a map that is piggybacking for dear life. They took $76,500 USD from kickstarter after fees and made themselves monetarily obligated to their (investors) backers. They are handling it so very poorly and don't even put updates on kickstarter or their own website that has a forum infested with bots.

Dragging in how much someone working on an actual game engine makes is pretty irrelevant. This is the kind of arguments people make for their overpriced content on various marketplaces and wonder why they're still poor. Even the ones aimed directly at independent devs.

Code being buggy has little to do with salaries. It has entirely to do with not being lazy and trying to sweep them under the rug. It's certainly not for a lack of bugs being reported and reproduced. Yet not worth the time for whatever reason they make up. If anything it has to do with the lack of liabilities when something does catastrophically fuck up. Even then it's only the little guys that actually get affected by it.

That other software only costs as much as it does because it has a niche market that they know will pay that much. They're not aiming to push millions of copies or risk going under. Just maybe they should consider not blowing 2-4x the budget of the game on ridiculously expensive forms of marketing. Perhaps not building their own engine from scratch needlessly. Licensing DRM. You get the idea.

How exactly do you see a project through without completing it? Getting this kind of shit started is the trivial part. Anyone can start a project. The hard part is all these ADD project leaders sticking with it and rolling with the limitations, which majority of them fail at spectacularly and usually disappear without a word. Have you ever looked at the graveyard of incomplete projects on ModDB? This is what happens when you don't complete your project, nothing. Most of them had plenty of quality work to show as well.

The difference between game and mod is the same it's always been. You either made tools to let designers do their thing or you had programmers holding their hand. Alternatively they had experience in both. They're being paid as designers, not the fact they can use the editor. It's only an exercise in how well you work with someones else's abstract limitations.

UntamedLoli wrote:I hardly even know where to begin. It doesn't really matter how much or how little it is. It's a map that is piggybacking for dear life. They took $76,500 USD from kickstarter after fees and made themselves monetarily obligated to their (investors) backers. They are handling it so very poorly and don't even put updates on kickstarter or their own website that has a forum infested with bots.

I can agree that the PR aspect of it is not being handled well. However, they have no monetary obligation, which is the point of Kickstarter to begin with.

UntamedLoli wrote:Code being buggy has little to do with salaries. It has entirely to do with not being lazy and trying to sweep them under the rug. It's certainly not for a lack of bugs being reported and reproduced. Yet not worth the time for whatever reason they make up. If anything it has to do with the lack of liabilities when something does catastrophically fuck up. Even then it's only the little guys that actually get affected by it.

Fixing bugs, I would agree, has little to do with salary, and entirely to do with the company or entity making the judgement of whether a bug is worth fixing or not, since bug free code is functionally impossible. However, I would argue that salary has a great deal with hiring people who design software that is less buggy to begin with. The first code I wrote was terrible, buggy, and insecure as hell. I've learned since, but now I'm not a student, I get paid.

UntamedLoli wrote:That other software only costs as much as it does because it has a niche market that they know will pay that much. They're not aiming to push millions of copies or risk going under. Just maybe they should consider not blowing 2-4x the budget of the game on ridiculously expensive forms of marketing. Perhaps not building their own engine from scratch needlessly. Licensing DRM. You get the idea.

I can partially agree. The engine part is a hard choice, since licensing one means you have to share the profits with another firm and that becomes a growing cost, whereas developing an engine is a relatively fixed rate cost, since most programmers do not get to ask for 2% of the profits on top of their salary. But sometimes that fixed cost is so high that and your revenue is so low, that licensing and configuring is way cheaper.

Marketing... I despise it, I find it wasteful, abusive sometimes, and so illogical. But it works.

UntamedLoli wrote:How exactly do you see a project through without completing it? Getting this kind of shit started is the trivial part. Anyone can start a project. The hard part is all these ADD project leaders sticking with it and rolling with the limitations, which majority of them fail at spectacularly and usually disappear without a word. Have you ever looked at the graveyard of incomplete projects on ModDB? This is what happens when you don't complete your project, nothing. Most of them had plenty of quality work to show as well.

I worded myself poorly. You can stick with a project for a long time, and it may not succeed. But the persistence in the face of difficulty is the key part, and I agree with you, most people fail at this. Of course, my view is very biased. An incomplete project is not worth much to an aspiring game designer. An incomplete project is perfectly fine for an engineer, since it was the experience doing the coding and software design that was desired, whether the game was completed or not.

UntamedLoli wrote:The difference between game and mod is the same it's always been. You either made tools to let designers do their thing or you had programmers holding their hand. Alternatively they had experience in both. They're being paid as designers, not the fact they can use the editor. It's only an exercise in how well you work with someones else's abstract limitations.

I may be simply misinterpreting what you are saying here. But to clarify, a mod is a mod because it was created via tools created by the original game creator? If this is the case, would that not make everything Blizzard makes for SC2 and Storm a mod because they are all created via the SC2/Storm editors? I apologize for appearing ignorant, but I've not really understood the separation between a mod and a game, given that almost no one directly codes a game from scratch, they use someone elses tools to get started and to handle most of the work (Engines, Plugins, Content Packs, scripts to pipeline between tools and so forth). My naive interpretation is that a mod is the creation of material that can not alter its environment. But even that definition feels wrong, because most games can not alter the very game engine they run on, unless they pay extra for the engine source code to implement such customization's.

A mod actually does alter the environment, which is the prime difference between a map and a mod in scbw/sc2. No sc2 mod can exist since blizzard bans people outright for making or running them, instead you can use the in-house tools but you cant actually alter the environment as you say. This is made more confusing sine blizzard actually put 'mod' as a classification type which doesnt make sense at all since that isn't a mod, just changed data.

A game typically holds a major difference in engine. I honestly think heroes of the storm is just a mod for sc2 given it uses the same engine. they just treat it differently.

Yeah, in essence heroes et all are basically mods. Anything using a prebuilt engine is effectively a mod of that engine. The line there can be blurry, you're right. But that is, at the heart, what tends to happen. It's always been that way for an extent, because many vintage console (Arcade, NES, etc) games were literally mods of existing games/engines, sometimes even illegal ones. The Earthworm Jim engine, for example, was modded plenty of times to produce similar platformers. Sony has a few engines they licensed out for people to effectively mod to create ps3 games. Something that is self-contained within a tiny eco-system portion of a game can be considered a map (like dota, arcade maps, special counterstrike maps etc) since they don't actually change the game, just the experience of a single location. Sc2 as it is doesn't natively support "real" mods anymore since they removed folder hotloading and custom mpqs way back, though dependencies give you mod-like abilities within the very restricted battle.net environment, so they're kind of mods of battle.net in a sense.

A mod may not be incapable of altering its environment, it may also simply not want to. This is why people use engines like Unity or Unreal and never touch the codebase - they just want to mod what is already there. Both mods and these "games" just build off of what is basically the most difficult part of making a game, the engine, already having been completed for them. That they also get free updates to that engine, often very significant ones, is like having a programming staff of top level skill working for you. Many of these engines, like Unreal 4, have high level interfaces specifically designed to remove the need for having programming staff to begin with (Blueprints, Galaxy, Ruby, etc.), though evidently having existing programming knowledge is very nice. A rule of thumb is that, with the appropriate people working for you, nothing can't be changed. Reverse engineering is a tremendous part of modding for many games. We don't see it a lot post-brood war and d2 because most people interested in low level modding did not like warcraft 3 or other newer titles, or moved on to other things, and the new people that took their place both had no existing skills of this nature and didn't want to learn them because they didn't feel it was necessary. I think that partially contributes to a lot of muddy mindsets about project quality, and therefore monetary value of simply time, as well. The kind of projects that were expected for a lot of these older games were basically all handmade content and a lot of fundamental changes to the engines at times on top of it, all made, at the most, out of the developer's pocket. I don't recall anyone ever asking for handouts just to work on their hobby, if anything they offered to pay for help personally to make it happen, and even that was rare.

In Unreal 4 you get full, free access to the source code. I and many others consider that the industry standard for this kind of software right now. I expect the other prebuilt engines to eventually fold to that marketing scheme or lose their high-end licensees, as it is apparently quite an issue for many of them for the reasons you state. At that stage I think the concept and many communities surrounding modding will die.

Last edited by IskatuMesk on Mon Nov 02, 2015 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

IskatuMesk wrote:Kitbash is to take pieces of other models and slap them together to make something "new". It originated in spriting, as you surely saw a lot of things to that extent in Brood War. Some kitbashes are very masterfully done (a few on SEN, and the uplink center HKS made) in which they basically look like they were originally created like that. But the vast majority look just like a bunch of random bits of stuff were cobbled together for the heck of it.

Buru is a Silithid boss in World of Warcraft. SCU used the mspaint bucket function to make his texture a bright brown and then made him shiny and called it a zerg unit. Well, the exact version they modified is actually from Mists of Pandaria, but that only makes it more offensive because they could have used the higher resolution source texture and modified that instead of butchering it.

/edit

For the record I don't think kitbashing or porting are necessarily wrong or bad, but anyone making assets should show some kind of quality control and that is not commonly displayed by the sc2 community. Almost all people who port WoW models either butcher them or don't even bother to update them for sc2, and most kitbashes are at the best extremely schizophrenic.

WTF. ahahahahaha. ^^

Yes, some quality control would be nice, but people who ported that obviously must have been proud. Right? Such a downer to hear: "Thanks for your effort, but this is bad and lazy.

IskatuMesk wrote:Kitbash is to take pieces of other models and slap them together to make something "new". It originated in spriting, as you surely saw a lot of things to that extent in Brood War. Some kitbashes are very masterfully done (a few on SEN, and the uplink center HKS made) in which they basically look like they were originally created like that. But the vast majority look just like a bunch of random bits of stuff were cobbled together for the heck of it.

Buru is a Silithid boss in World of Warcraft. SCU used the mspaint bucket function to make his texture a bright brown and then made him shiny and called it a zerg unit. Well, the exact version they modified is actually from Mists of Pandaria, but that only makes it more offensive because they could have used the higher resolution source texture and modified that instead of butchering it.

/edit

For the record I don't think kitbashing or porting are necessarily wrong or bad, but anyone making assets should show some kind of quality control and that is not commonly displayed by the sc2 community. Almost all people who port WoW models either butcher them or don't even bother to update them for sc2, and most kitbashes are at the best extremely schizophrenic.

WTF. ahahahahaha. ^^

Yes, some quality control would be nice, but people who ported that obviously must have been proud. Right? Such a downer to hear: "Thanks for your effort, but this is bad and lazy.

I think the issue here is that there were investors. It would be anticipated that the result coming back would be commensurate to the commitments made by the team (which my understanding is, thus far they haven't but who knows what the future may bring). It wouldn't be the first time the scope of a project was grossly underestimated. And since the project depends on funding, when that dries up and you have scope creep? What do you do? Their biggest issue is that they changed the dynamics of the game from its original intended direction to (V.R.P.G.) and with that, likely had to reinvent a LOT of stuff. They tried to do this to acclimate to the times, but instead they set themselves back.

What they 'should' have done is release content as originally promised, and 'then' gone back and done V.R.P.G. as a patch, enhancements, maybe even done another Kickstarter for it. If a quality product was released, people would absolutely invest in another. Think people will invest in Upheaval Arts right now when the $85,000 already sunk in has not germinated in a final product yet?

But I digress. Investors change everything. Once people give you resources, it's a contract. You need to return to them what you promised. It's different if it's non-profit. Come go, ditch it, do a half-*$$ job on it. Sure people may be irritated by the mod/campaign when they play but you don't 'owe' them anything.

So proud of their kitbashing and WoW ports or not, for $85 grand, they should be able to produce a LOT more in a lot less time, yes even with full-time jobs on the side.

'How do you know this Oracle you cynical SOB?'

I will be able to prove this beyond any measure of doubt in the coming months. How? Can't say just yet.

IskatuMesk wrote:In Unreal 4 you get full, free access to the source code. I and many others consider that the industry standard for this kind of software right now. I expect the other prebuilt engines to eventually fold to that marketing scheme or lose their high-end licensees, as it is apparently quite an issue for many of them for the reasons you state. At that stage I think the concept and many communities surrounding modding will die.

I think this a VERY salient point.

Most modding, as far as I understand it, was born out of the reality that most games did NOT provide source code, nor provide an API of any kind to hook into them. So if a person wished to alter the game, they had to reverse engineer and inject their own data into the code logic, thus 'mod' the program logic or data flow.

But... if you have complete and total access, what is there to mod, to hack into? One could consider modding a form of breaking into a house in order to repair it or change it. But if you are given the keys to the kingdom, is it considered breaking and entering anymore?

At such a point, there is no modding, there is only game development. And as Revolta noted, no such mods exist for SC2 because software engineers have become far better at enforcing the integrity of their programs, since sadly, a method to mod a program is no different then the method to root kit a machine, the logic is the same, introduce external/unvalidated input into the data or logic flow. Sadly, the sane tools to prevent malicious manipulation of computers is the same tools to prevent unwanted manipulation of any other program. In the case of SC2, I believe it runs an integrity check against known hashes, same as any other software that wishes to verify/validate it hasn't been tampered with, and deletes any files that fail such a check, and redownloads them from B.net.

Ideally, sc2 would have gone the route of Sins, Supreme Commander, Dawn of War etc and allowed local mods that have their own unique hash checksums to compare against when running online. Sc2's dependency system would have easily supported this. But I don't think Blizzard is even aware that such a community existed for their earlier games, particularly since sc2 seems to be most wc3 mappers who never got into major custom asset creation anyways.

I certainly understand the security risks of allowing clientside modding that doesn't undergo some kind of verification. I know of ways to very, very easily and undetectably modify bw to defeat cloaking, nuke indicators, etc.

I've been flailing around off and on so theres been several other replies since that elaborate on the same things.

ArcanePariah wrote:I can agree that the PR aspect of it is not being handled well. However, they have no monetary obligation, which is the point of Kickstarter to begin with.

They are still obligated until they complete the project and dish out the rewards. It's mostly to protect yourself from legal liabilities. The point is that people giving you money through crowd funding should really be treated with more respect. This type of communication is really easy to do. Businesses do it too and it's disgusting. Small groups don't have red tape to watch out for. It also pays off heavily.

ArcanePariah wrote:Fixing bugs, I would agree, has little to do with salary, and entirely to do with the company or entity making the judgement of whether a bug is worth fixing or not, since bug free code is functionally impossible. However, I would argue that salary has a great deal with hiring people who design software that is less buggy to begin with. The first code I wrote was terrible, buggy, and insecure as hell. I've learned since, but now I'm not a student, I get paid.

I was getting at more that the problems that usually show up are more performance related than directly being bugs. There's a lot of ways to do the same thing. One particular issue that keeps coming up is the reliance on the engines tick rate and/or complete lack of using deltas. Even though they really aren't that complicated. Yet end up slaving you to a frame rate otherwise. Most devs really are just lazy though and will only do what they need to rather than what they should do. Which will just exacerbate any problems that show up later. The wonderful world of networking and security is just a whole other rats nest.

ArcanePariah wrote:I may be simply misinterpreting what you are saying here. But to clarify, a mod is a mod because it was created via tools created by the original game creator? If this is the case, would that not make everything Blizzard makes for SC2 and Storm a mod because they are all created via the SC2/Storm editors? I apologize for appearing ignorant, but I've not really understood the separation between a mod and a game, given that almost no one directly codes a game from scratch, they use someone elses tools to get started and to handle most of the work (Engines, Plugins, Content Packs, scripts to pipeline between tools and so forth). My naive interpretation is that a mod is the creation of material that can not alter its environment. But even that definition feels wrong, because most games can not alter the very game engine they run on, unless they pay extra for the engine source code to implement such customization's.

Thank you for the points, quite insightful.

This discussion comes up a lot because of confusion. It's about the scope between maps, mods and games.

Maps sit in their own sandbox isolated from the rest of the game. Their scope is the map and content that depends on it running to load. You are very much at the mercy of the engine you are working with, in the case of SC2, Blizzard as well. It's generally through means supplied by the devs of said game. You're also likely working with someone elses content entirely that you have no ownership over. I really just throw Blizzards definition of mods in here too because of how their system works. Mods can't exist without a map. Extensions can't exist without b.ent. Content being online only (unless your name is Blizzard) is fucking retarded by every definition.

Mods are basically game development with the limitations of someone else's black box of an engine that has been specialized for its purpose. They can do anything the engine lets them except for the daring few that want to hack an engine. You could literally do anything in SC1 provided you knew assembly at this point. UT/UE, Source and Bethesda games being the main ideas here, plenty of others exist as well. You're not being told what to do by an online subsystem. What the original devs of the game think essentially doesn't fucking matter. Most of whats possible is certainly outside of what they allowed because of community made tools and reverse engineering. Still probably balls deep in someone elses work but now you have the option of replacing almost anything with what you want.

Games. You are basically as free or as locked down as you want to be. Which is what really separates this from the rest. You can have source access if you want it which means you can actually see what does what.

There being no modding is really only the case in online games such as SC2/D3. Blizzard declared war against cheating yet the only casualties are the ones that didn't cheat because the race never ends. Most online games will let you play around with visual replacements at best, some don't. It's not really a case of engines being more secure or anything. They're just not worth the time if you won't have the means to play them afterwards because of being banned or otherwise.

/e

I really spend too much time just trying to figure out various things. Games could elaborated on more, like the fact a mod can become a game of its own. Most of them happened because the team/person would get offered an engine license. Maps and mods also generally don't have any legal grounds for directly earning any money off them as well.

The Oracle wrote:I think the issue here is that there were investors. It would be anticipated that the result coming back would be commensurate to the commitments made by the team (which my understanding is, thus far they haven't but who knows what the future may bring). It wouldn't be the first time the scope of a project was grossly underestimated. And since the project depends on funding, when that dries up and you have scope creep? What do you do? Their biggest issue is that they changed the dynamics of the game from its original intended direction to (V.R.P.G.) and with that, likely had to reinvent a LOT of stuff. They tried to do this to acclimate to the times, but instead they set themselves back.

What they 'should' have done is release content as originally promised, and 'then' gone back and done V.R.P.G. as a patch, enhancements, maybe even done another Kickstarter for it. If a quality product was released, people would absolutely invest in another. Think people will invest in Upheaval Arts right now when the $85,000 already sunk in has not germinated in a final product yet?

But I digress. Investors change everything. Once people give you resources, it's a contract. You need to return to them what you promised. It's different if it's non-profit. Come go, ditch it, do a half-*$$ job on it. Sure people may be irritated by the mod/campaign when they play but you don't 'owe' them anything.

So proud of their kitbashing and WoW ports or not, for $85 grand, they should be able to produce a LOT more in a lot less time, yes even with full-time jobs on the side.

Heh, I get this feeling that you don't like the creators of this project that much. Anyway, I kind of agree with you. The idea sounded good on a piece of paper, but this was way more than these people could handle. I think in a competence kind of way, not there was too much work kind of way. But then there is the question: What did the 85.000 go to? Was this what they considered a fair salary for their work? Or was this a project about passion, so much so that they quieted their jobs and the money was for their living expense?

From what i know about kickstarter, which is why I stay away from it, is that there is no way of getting refunded on the basis that "i did not get what i paid for". The best example i know of is Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency project. The concept of "give us money or you wont see this [insert trailer here]" seems very rotten to me.

The Oracle wrote:'How do you know this Oracle you cynical SOB?'

I will be able to prove this beyond any measure of doubt in the coming months. How? Can't say just yet.

That's just great. Another tease.

Last edited by CowardI on Mon Nov 02, 2015 8:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The Oracle wrote:I think the issue here is that there were investors. It would be anticipated that the result coming back would be commensurate to the commitments made by the team (which my understanding is, thus far they haven't but who knows what the future may bring). It wouldn't be the first time the scope of a project was grossly underestimated. And since the project depends on funding, when that dries up and you have scope creep? What do you do? Their biggest issue is that they changed the dynamics of the game from its original intended direction to (V.R.P.G.) and with that, likely had to reinvent a LOT of stuff. They tried to do this to acclimate to the times, but instead they set themselves back.

What they 'should' have done is release content as originally promised, and 'then' gone back and done V.R.P.G. as a patch, enhancements, maybe even done another Kickstarter for it. If a quality product was released, people would absolutely invest in another. Think people will invest in Upheaval Arts right now when the $85,000 already sunk in has not germinated in a final product yet?

But I digress. Investors change everything. Once people give you resources, it's a contract. You need to return to them what you promised. It's different if it's non-profit. Come go, ditch it, do a half-*$$ job on it. Sure people may be irritated by the mod/campaign when they play but you don't 'owe' them anything.

So proud of their kitbashing and WoW ports or not, for $85 grand, they should be able to produce a LOT more in a lot less time, yes even with full-time jobs on the side.

Heh, I get this feeling that you don't like the creators of this project that much. Anyway, I kind of agree with you. The idea sounded good on a piece of paper, but this was way more than these people could handle. I think in a competence kind of way, not there was too much work kind of way. But then there is the question: What did the 85.000 go to? Was this what they considered a fair salary for their work? Or was this a project about passion, so much so that they quieted their jobs and the money was for their living expense?

From what i know about kickstarter, which is way i stay away from it, is that there is no way of getting refunded on the basis that "i did not get what i paid for". The best example i know of is Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency project. The concept of "give us money or you wont see this [insert trailer here]" seems very rotten to me.

The Oracle wrote:'How do you know this Oracle you cynical SOB?'

I will be able to prove this beyond any measure of doubt in the coming months. How? Can't say just yet.

That's just great. Another tease.

Since there are $$ involved, Upheaval should really post financials to show exactly where that cash went.